by Lawton, John
He shrugged off his jacket and threw it into the back of the car – bloody and shirtsleeved once more. Mary McDiarmuid backed the car off and Troy and Shrimp Robertson stood at the gates to the dockyard.
Troy had no time for it but the look on Robertson’s face was the same one he had been wearing that night they had fished Rork’s body from the canal basin. The urgency of something that might burst within him that had eventually led to his account of Troy’s first – and so far only – encounter with the Ryan twins.
‘Whatever it is, save it,’ Troy said.
‘Can’t. Gotta speak.’
‘Mr Robertson, we haven’t got the time.’
‘Gotta. Gotta ask. Sir, why am I stuck out here and you going in alone?’
Robertson’s speech had rattled out with the rapidity of a machinegun. Troy heard the cry go up from the other side of the building. The corny melodrama of ‘This is the police!’
‘Why? Because it’s not six weeks since you were a cadet at Hendon.’
‘You mean if they, like, come out shooting? Cos I bet I’ve had weapons training more recently than any of us.’
‘You’re staying here.’
‘Remember the Derek Bentley case, sir? They teach it in college now. Don’t approach an armed man alone.’
‘You’re staying here.’ Troy checked the gun.
‘Metropolitan Police guidelines state, sir, that. . .’
Safety off.
‘This is no time to be quoting me the rule book.’
Six .357 bullets in the chamber.
‘. . . that an unaccompanied officer -’
Troy stepped through the gate into the yard, but Robertson followed, undeterred.
‘Go back, Mr Robertson. It can’t be long now.’
‘- an unaccompanied officer when in pursuance of—’
‘Stop. Stop right now!’
Troy pushed Robertson, and pushed him again.
Troy pushed Robertson. The push saved both their lives.
109
The Bentley was pulled up outside, at the river’s edge. Mary McDiarmuid stood by the driver’s door, hands thrust deep in her coat pockets.
‘Are you wearing gloves?’
She took her hands from her pockets to show that she was.
Troy handed her the gun. ‘Bag it and keep it clean. It’s evidence. Now, the nearest police box.’
They drove a couple of hundred yards to a police box in Jamaica Road. Troy called an ambulance for Robertson, then called the Yard and asked to be put through to Onions at home.
‘Wildeve’s in hospital. Godbehere’s dead. So are the Ryans.’
‘What?’
‘Wildeve’s in hos—’
‘I mean how?’
‘I shot them.’
‘You shot them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus wept. Half an hour. OK? Half an hour. My office.’
Troy sank back into the passenger seat of his Bentley. Closed his eyes. They had plenty of time. There was no way Stan would get from Acton to the Yard in half an hour.
‘Back to the Yard. And let’s try sticking to the speed limit, shall we?’
110
Troy stood in the doorway of Onions’s outer office. A lipsticked cigarette burned in the ashtray, the reading lamp cast its circle on a sheaf of white papers and grubby carbons, the electric typewriter hummed and rattled in conversation with itself.
He walked through into Onions’s own office and sat down in the visitor’s chair, facing the desk. The blinds were still drawn, only slivers of sunlight slicing in. That was fine. Darkness was fine.
Several minutes passed. He could hear telephones ringing somewhere down the corridor. Then the phone in the outer office rang, and he heard hurried footsteps, the sound of raggy lungs dragging on a cigarette and Madge Hardwick’s voice: ‘Yes. Yes. The commissioner’s on his way. Yes. I’ll tell him.’
The bell rang gently as she laid the receiver back in the cradle. Then the stifled scream as she noticed Troy. ‘You daft bugger! You nearly scared me half to death. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing sitting there in the dark?’
She stepped a pace into the room and flicked on the light. Noticed Troy’s shirt and trousers, stained with Wildeve’s blood, stained with Shrimp Robertson’s, stained with his own. A coat of many colours, all of them reddish-brown. He knew how it looked to her and he didn’t care.
‘I’m waiting for the commissioner,’ he said simply.
‘Well, you’ve done it now, haven’t you? You’ve bloomin’ well done it now. I always told the boss you were mad, and this time you’ve proved it. You’ve gone too far this time. Too far by half. You mad bugger. What do you think you’re playing at?’
The forgetfulness of her own rhetoric let her stray too close. Troy grabbed her by one arm. ‘Madge, what is it you think I’ve done?’
‘Let go of me!’
‘Tell me.’
‘You killed those men, didn’t you?’
‘Quite. I just shot two men in cold blood. So, tell me, Madge, why push your luck?’
He let go and she ran from the office, straight into Onions, babbling, ‘He threatened me! He threatened me!’
‘Madge,’ Onions said softly, ‘what are you doing here at this time of night?’
‘The manpower report. I was just—’
‘Go home, Madge.’
‘He threatened me. The mad bugger threatened to—’
‘Go home, woman! For once in your life do as you’re told!’
Madge cowered, snatched her handbag off her desk and ran.
Onions appeared in front of Troy. He, too, had pulled his suit on over his pyjamas. It gave him the faintest resemblance to a clown. He flicked off the overhead and turned on his desk lamp. ‘Jesus wept. Jesus wept.’
He flopped himself down in the chair behind the desk, hands rubbing at his face. When he took them away, Troy could see the redness in the brilliant blue eyes, the inflamed, sleepless eyelids, the way-past-midnight stubble on the chin, the infinite world-weariness that Stan had become since the job took him over.
‘Had she been here long?’
‘A brief encounter.’
Onions smiled at this. ‘They can never be brief enough, can they?’
Troy said nothing.
‘How’s Wildeve?’
‘Better than I was.’
‘You could have called me when he was hit.’
Troy said nothing. Took the reproach for what it was.
Onions said, ‘Tell me. Tell me everything.’
Troy told him.
Eventually he reached, ‘They came at us like cowboys in a western. Guns blazing. One with a sawn-off shotgun. One with a handgun. Robertson went down at once. I hit the deck. Told them to stop or I’d fire. They kept coming. Guns still blazing. That’s when I shot them. The next thing I knew Sergeant Kinney had arrived with a couple of constables. They fixed up Robertson, put a tourniquet on his leg. I phoned you. Came straight here.’
When he’d finished Onions said, ‘Does Godbehere have any family?’
‘I don’t know,’ Troy replied, feeling the only touch of guilt he would feel that evening.
‘What’s the charge? Mazzer, I mean. What are you charging him with?’
‘Dunno,’ said Troy. ‘I’ll think of something.’
‘Who’s in command back there?’
‘The sergeant I just mentioned. Name of Kinney. Out of Rotherhithe.’
‘A uniform?’
‘Yes. I mean, Godbehere’s dead, Jack’s in hospital, Mazzer’s under arrest. . . I’m . . .’ Troy held up a blood-soaked arm as though he was a marionette jerked upon a string.
Onions seemed to take in his whole appearance as if for the first time that night.
‘Jesus Christ, what do you look like? You’re covered in the stuff.’
‘Most of it, most of it isn’t mine.’
‘We’ll have to get someone. There has to be someone.’
&n
bsp; Troy no longer cared. It wasn’t his problem any more. It was just logistics. Onions seemed at last to be gathering up the ragged pyjama cord of thought.
‘Jesus H. Christ. Let’s get this over and done with.’
One last rubbery rub at his cheeks and jowls to shake him into life.
‘First off, where’s the gun now?’
‘My gun? McDiarmuid has it.’
‘How many shots were fired?’
‘I don’t know,’ Troy lied.
‘And young Robertson was a witness to this?’
‘No, no, he wasn’t, he was out cold.’
‘And you had no choice, right?’
‘I just said – they’d already shot Robertson.’
‘Both of them?’
‘I think,’ Troy played an aria on a theme of truth, ‘that you will find both their guns have been fired.’
‘And they shot at you too?’
Troy pointed to the holes in his trousers, and the florin-sized rings of blood around them.
‘Right,’ said Onions. ‘Right. . . So . . . there’ll be an inquiry . . . You realise I’ll have to suspend you while it’s on?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything but to be . . . suspended.’
It struck Troy that it was the first time in his entire career as a copper that he had been suspended. He wondered if the same thought had occurred to Onions.
‘And you’ll have to get your injuries seen to. And I mean a proper doctor, not that Polish lunatic. Then, if you’re up to it, type up your report and let me have it before noon. I’ll stall the press till then.’
‘The press?’ Troy said.
‘Freddie, I used to think you didn’t have a naïve bone in your body. They’ll be all over this. A dead copper and two dead villains. Of course they will. Or did you think you could set them on to me without them wanting a piece of you when the time came?’
One thing Troy had always admired in Onions was his unpredictability.
111
Mary McDiarmuid drove him to Goodwin’s Court. He almost nodded off next to her, a half-waking state in which he knew where he was and could hear the outside world, but less audibly than the cricket on his shoulder. One voice repeating, ‘Not like this. Not like this.’
112
When he got home, he found Kolankiewicz had already let himself in. His Gladstone bag was open on the table, a bottle of Polish vodka open next to it. Just as well. Troy could not face Anna.
In the open bag he could see the Webley Kolankiewicz had all but confiscated from him and, next to it, wrapped in a sheet of clear Cellophane, the Magnum. He wondered at what point Mary McDiarmuid and Kolankiewicz had got together. Then he remembered, he had told her it was ‘evidence’, and if it was, what else would she do with it but give it to Kolankiewicz? Perhaps there was no conspiracy. Perhaps it was all a conspiracy.
‘You ready for this?’
Troy snapped out of his reverie and pulled off his trousers. His right leg looked like the surface of the moon.
‘This will hurt.’
‘Let it,’ said Troy. ‘Just pour me a vodka first.’
As Kolankiewicz picked out the first piece of buckshot with a pair of tweezers Troy said, ‘Did you look in on Mazzer before you left?’
‘Sleeping like a baby.’
‘And the whisky?’
‘Three-quarters gone. If we – and it is not often I bracket myself with you, my boy – if we are lucky, he will remember nothing in the morning.’
‘Quite,’ said Troy wincing at the stabs of pain. ‘We – if that is not the word that offends you – are going to get away with it.’
‘Get away with what?’
113
Troy pushed Robertson. The push saved both their lives.
Each had taken a step back from the confrontational force of it and the first blast of Patrick Ryan’s shotgun had ripped between them, peppering Troy’s right leg and tearing a piece out of Robertson’s left. The boy fell. Troy had heard the crack of his skull on the cobblestones as he spun to earth himself. The second blast roared over his head – he landed on his right side, palm flat upon the stones, his left hand levelling the revolver on Ryan as he lurched towards him.
Ryan was running, the breech of his sawn-off shotgun open. Running, trying to reload and run at the same time, blocking his brother’s aim.
‘Pat, you fuckin’ berk, get down!’
Lorcan Ryan was weaving around his twin, trying for a clear shot and failing, the handgun waving far too wildly in the air.
Patrick Ryan was fumbling, couldn’t get the breech of his gun shut. Troy shot him twice in the chest and blew him off his feet. He fell backwards, bent at the knees, arching into the posture of a crab – but Troy wasn’t looking at Patrick Ryan any more: he was looking at Lorcan Ryan, who had finally found his aim.
It was the last thing he expected. Ryan had dropped the gun without a single shot fired, and sent it clattering down to the cobblestones. Then he had knelt and taken his brother in his arms. Bloody and tender – the death rattle scarcely risen in the dead man’s throat.
Troy got slowly to his feet, his gun on Ryan, feeling behind him for Robertson. The boy groaned. Troy glanced down at him. He was still out – the bleeding was bad but it was all from his leg. Troy stepped backwards and groped for Robertson’s collar, meaning to drag him to safety.
Lorcan Ryan was cradling his brother’s head, much as Troy had done with Jack a couple of hours before, cradling the head, hugging it to his chest and wailing like the worst of Trojan women. A deep-throated wail, a wail drenched in the anguish of the self-pitying. The keening of a man who had been above nature, a man to whom this could not and did not happen.
Troy took a grip on Robertson and heaved.
But Ryan stopped wailing and spoke. ‘You can’t leave us like this.’
It was a voice remarkably free of hysteria.
He wasn’t screaming.
He scarcely raised his voice.
It sounded almost calm, almost rational.
‘You can’t leave us like this. Not like this.’
Troy looked at Robertson. The faintest stirrings of consciousness. It would be minutes before he came out of it. Troy let him fall, took a dozen slow steps towards the Ryans, until he could see the guns clearly, until they lay at his feet almost side by side. The shotgun had fallen from the dead fingers of Patrick Ryan, breech open. Troy looked down at it – a custom-made hammerless twin, a faint RC, carved in the stock, the entwined initials of its maker, Robert Churchill – now a brutal stub of wood and steel, crudely hacked off at the stock and barrels. A dark, small voice whispered in Troy’s ear, ‘It’s the life of you, Mr Troy, the life of you . . .’ Bob Churchill, hovering over him like a guardian angel. ‘What they can come at you with . . . what they can do to you . . . if. . . if. . .’ Troy kicked it behind him. The revolver was Rork’s, the Magnum .357. A tap of the foot and Troy sent it skidding across the cobbles until it lay within the reach of Lorcan Ryan.
Troy lowered his own gun, let it hang level with his thigh, finger on the trigger, thumb on the hammer, and said, ‘Pick it up.’
For a moment he thought Ryan had not heard him. Then he had gently laid his brother’s head on the cobblestones and inched around to face Troy. He put one hand over the butt of the revolver, still looking up at Troy, as if saying, ‘We’re level now’ – watching his face.
Troy was watching his hands. Whatever glint of madness or malice flashed through Ryan’s eyes, Troy did not see it. When Ryan’s fingers closed on the gun, Troy blew his brains out.
Ryan’s whole body rose up with the force of the shot, then crumpled like a saggy balloon, the gun pointing to heaven, and some reflex in the muscles of his hand twitched like a galvanised frog’s leg on the trigger – a single bullet spent itself in the breaking sky.
Seconds later Sergeant Kinney had run up to him, red-faced and breathless.
‘Bloody hell,’ was all he said.
Troy had
turned away, looked at the two young constables putting a tourniquet on Robertson’s leg, looked at Robertson, conscious, bothered and bewildered, and walked past him.
114
It was a night without sleep, a night without women. Just as well. His leg hurt like hell. And he would have hated to have to explain to any of them. It was a night spent musing, musing on images that he would scarcely have said troubled him, but which, nonetheless, he was incapable of dismissing readily from his mind.
He could see 1944 so clearly. That bitter winter’s day out on the bombsite when he had recruited the kids of Stepney Green into an ad hoc and, as Bonham had insisted, highly immoral posse – a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, an array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs, outsize jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding-basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps – eight willing heroes, who saw themselves as Tex Ritter or Gene Autry, galloping to his rescue. All they asked was to be bribed and he had bribed them. He’d never forgotten Shrimp, who had bargained with him over possession of the cartridge case, or Tub, who had found the body in the first place … or Carrots, who had juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, and he could remember names like Spud and Plonk and Plug, but until today, if he rolled his mental projector down that row of children, half of the faces would have eluded memory. Now he could see them all – for the first time in fifteen years he could see the two boys who’d stood sixth and seventh, next to the carrot-headed boy with the cocoa tin, a bit bigger than the others, two smirking, nudging twins, who’d seemed throughout to be sharing a private joke, slapping each other, and always on the verge of giggling themselves silly. Robertson had seemed the hard one – withholding information until the last minute, talking to Troy only in private and demanding an outrageous half-crown for what he had to say. The twins had seemed for all the world to be no more than a couple of scallywags who’d seized any excuse for a day off school. Neither of them had even spoken to Troy.
